


A Little of You, A Lot of Bloodletting

by monochrome_agalma



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Fingerfucking, Hate Sex, Masturbation, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Repressed nuns and decadent queer rakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:14:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26724982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monochrome_agalma/pseuds/monochrome_agalma
Summary: Horrors pile upon horrors when Harrow walks in on Ianthe masturbating and finds her unwilling to stop. Sometime after Ch. 31.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 6
Kudos: 80





	A Little of You, A Lot of Bloodletting

**Author's Note:**

> It's probably evil of me to start a paragraph with mass infant deaths and Harrow's parents' suicide, and end it with Ianthe jerking off, but I did what I did. I also can't claim that I actually have Harrow's (""Harrow's"") narrative voice down here but all I really wanted was a glorified Reader/Ianthe fic where Ianthe tops from the bottom while wearing a shimmering, sexy garment. 
> 
> Misleading title; there's actually not that much blood in this one :/

You were the product of a generation of infant dead. As a child, you had watched your parents loop nooses around their throats. you had broken into the well fortified sepulcher in Drearburh’s abyss and gaped, eyes wide, at the apocalyptic secrets lying cold and dead inside. In the past weeks, you had seen more assassination attempts than your wards could check. You had been squarely informed, by sheepish implication and express statement alike, that if the Saint of Duty didn’t off you soon, a Resurrection Beast would finish the job. You had witnessed two saints in the necromantic pantheon drunkenly getting it on with God himself, for fuck’s sake, but still, few prospects seemed to you as gut-wrenchingly mortifying as walking in on Ianthe Tridentarius touching herself. 

Not that the possibility had even crossed your mind before the actuality smacked you right in the face.

She was sprawled out on her bed. Her cheeks were the most flushed you had ever seen them and her lips had a splotchy, rotten bloom reminiscent of overripe fruit. Her hair, had it possessed any more vivacity than a limp pair of curtains, could have been said to be pooling around her. As it was, it had settled on the pillow, a few strands clumped together by what seemed to be a faint sweat on her brow and temples. She bit her lower lip slightly, her eyes screwed shut, her neck tossed back, a long, pale arc beckoning the eye down toward the gauzy ruffled collar of her heinous nightgown. To call it a “nightgown” perhaps stretched the capacities of the English language beyond what was fair or reasonable. It looked like nearly the same fabric as your diaphanous lyctoral robes, but a jaundiced yellow, shot through with threads of gold. You would have scoffed at it — what did she think the trials at Canaan House would entail, a candlelit orgy? — if it weren’t for the way the shimmering material clung to her breasts like some sort of coy, ineffectual veil which, fuck, that was probably the exact response that flimsy little excuse for a garment was designed to manipulate out of you. Ianthe had nearly ruined the effect by hiking the skirt up unceremoniously around her hips, but the careless decadence of that gesture only did her more favors. Her left hand, the one still covered in meat and skin, was busy between her thighs.

And since her cunt was out — fully _out_ — you hastened to yank the door closed behind you. Not out of any special concern for her dignity, you told yourself, but to spare the pristine eye-sockets of the holy dead lining the corridors of the Mithraeum. At the sound, she opened one hungry purple eye, as if she hadn’t heard you enter in the first place, and grinned. 

And then you found out that one of the very few things more disturbing than walking in on Ianthe Tridentarius touching herself was walking in on Ianthe Tridentarius touching herself and finding her unwilling to stop.

She didn’t even wait for you to react. Her confidence, her presumptuousness, her — something else — they all rolled off her in waves as she ran two fingers down her slit to wet them and brought them back up to her clit. She circled it slowly, opening her other eye, this one, thankfully, purple too. She held your gaze and you just stood there, somehow, speechless and immobilized. She parted those lips, mouldering rose petals, and let out a shameless little whine. You recognized it, with chagrin, as part of the same family of sounds you’d elicited from her twice in recent memory, first when you had — shudder to think — kissed her back on the _Erebos_ , and again mere days ago when you had straddled, broken, and remade her on the floor of this very room. You felt your cheeks burn and your insides wobble.

Ianthe drew her fingers more firmly across her clit. She first used deliberate, lingering strokes. Clean lines, easy for the even the most inexperienced observer to follow, should the observer be so inclined. She picked up speed, increased the pressure, got sloppy. The whole time she kept her eyes trained on you. They were fierce, tinged with a certain perverse giddiness, taking on a quality looked not unlike the one they had back at Canaan House, when Ianthe had ascended to lyctorhood, Naberius Tern’s soul thrilling, raw, inside of her. Here, though, they remained a stable, steady purple. She was in control now; whether this was a minor hunger or, worse, she’d simply figured out a way to muzzle its constant force, you could not say. Even as her body began ever so slightly unspooling — breath catching, eyelids fluttering, gilded phalanges winding their way into the coverlets — she held that focused, amethyst gaze upon you.

She stopped. You thought that might be it, this macabre spectacle of the flesh might finally be over, you could hustle yourself back to your quarters and sit quietly on the floor waiting for Ortus the First to cleave your ribs apart, if the traitorous pounding of your heart didn’t do it first. But no, that’d be too nice for the Princess of Ida. Her eyes still flashing, she slid herself backward, ensconced herself in the floppy pile of cushions arrayed against her headboard, and casually lifted her nightgown over her head. 

You did not mark the swell of her breasts, the unexpected delicacy of her pink nipples. Your eyes did not linger there before passing, with lewdness unbecoming a Black Vestal, over her toned abdominal muscles, her iliac crests, not jutting out awkwardly like yours but padded elegantly with layers of fat. You did not, you swear, draw closer, you promise your mouth did not suddenly go dry. Evidence suggested, however, that you did wet your lips, because Ianthe indulged herself in what must have been the most transparent _oh-so-you-like-what-you-see_ face any sexually reproducing organism had ever made.

“Allow me to do you a good turn, Harry. I know how it gnaws at that dessiccated heart of yours that I’ve seen what your pretty, pinched little face looks like under all that paint. Now you’ve seen all there is to see of me. Call it even?”

Despite the focused ferocity in those eyes, Ianthe’s voice when she said this was surprisingly breathy. Smug, sure. Dissembling? You betcha. But breathy all the same.

Before you could seize on this thread of vulnerability, she piped up again. What she said was something like, “I think I need another hand for this.” What you heard, as she slipped a glinting crook of newly-forged bone inside herself with a gasp, what you were sure she _meant_ for you to hear, was something like, “I think I need _your_ hand for this.” Ianthe thrust another digit of your handiwork into her cunt and let out a low, whiny moan. She set three fingers from her left hand to rubbing at her clit again, while she rocked against the the two skeletal claws inside her. Her eyes once more began to flutter until they finally fell shut. She lolled her head back into the pillows and, for the first time since this whole disaster had begun, she stopped watching you watching her. 

The chains of her gaze binding you no longer, you moved decisively, not to the door, not down the hallway, but up onto the bed and onto Ianthe. You did not kiss her, didn’t say a word, just firmly planted your teeth into the waxen flesh of her neck. You contemplated chewing her larynx right out of her throat, replacing those disgusting noises of hers with a grim gurgling that was really more your style, but you stopped just short of the suprahyoidal muscles and she wailed shamelessly. Worse, she lifted her left hand away from her throbbing clit and slung the whole arm over your shoulder. Blood was spattered on her neck as she caressed the black-shrouded knobs of your spine and she started to spit out some inane comment about “really getting the juices flowing.” You shut her up the first way your addled mind thought to. You grabbed her right arm at the gilded base of its radius and pulled the fingers you had made her out of her velvety slick cunt, where they were buried, knuckle deep. You replaced them with your own.

Ianthe had no flip response for that. She just bucked furiously against you, grinding her clit into your palm and cupping your face, grim but flushed, with her slick, skeletal hand. You did not give her the pleasure of suckling at those fingers. She offered herself for your tasting and you denied her, gritting your teeth and ignoring the warmth and wetness pooling between your own legs. 

She started to fall apart again, in earnest this time. She rolled her lanky frame in desperate waves against your fingers, first two, then, roughly, three. You didn’t think it would hurt her but you sure as hell hoped anyway. She gave no indication of pain, just more ambiguous signs — her breath quickened; her lips trembled; the crowns of her distal phalanges raked little pink lines down your cheek, smudging greasepaint as they went. 

“ _Fuck_ , Harrow,” she stammered as her pelvic muscles engaged, clenching around your fingers, as though she were trying to lock you into her. Her whole body shuddered as she came, her cunt spasming around you, her blood in your teeth.

You withdrew your fingers swiftly and lifted your body off of her, crawled to the far edge of the bed and collapsed onto your side in a too-hot heap of black fabrics. You stared at the wall silently and focused all of your energy toward stilling the seemingly irrepressible twitching of your hips. You forced yourself to breathe slowly, to calm each engorged capillary, to redirect bloodflow to the places you needed it. You wiped your fingers peevishly on Ianthe’s sheets. You felt her weight shift toward you on the bed and braced for the foul little remark to come but it never did. 

A hand, soft and covered in flesh, rested lightly on your back for a moment before sliding, ghost-like, away.


End file.
